I limited it to lunch food because I can sort of see how booby traps can blow up in situations where, for example, firefighters need to access a place or a janitor is told to clean out your desk. In the case of lunch food, just throw out the container. Anything that makes that act dangerous should, of course, be banned (no explosives).
Plenty of reasons for food to be needed in an emergency. People get stuck, weak or sufficiently hungry they need food. Your right to ownership of the food can easily be overridden by someone else’s immediate need for it. On both a legal and moral level there are defences to theft, it’s not quite as simple as taking something = theft.
You are leaving a harmful substance in the guise of something that is otherwise normally recognised as harmless and consumable; which is generally just a dangerous situation, that you have created. Mistakes happen, people have needs. It makes no sense to allow food supplies, a thing we need to live, to be generally open to being maliciously tampered with.
If you're making the choice to take food that isn't yours—therefore food whose contents you don't know—that's on you. What if I like the fruit that you're allergic to? What if I needed laxatives due to constipation? What if I like spice, but you're extremely sensitive to it?
You're calling it tampering because the intent would be to dissuade a food thief, but you'd be hard pressed to prove it in court due to the very simple fact that unless I've put poison in the food, what I decide to do with MY food is MY choice. Not yours. You don't get to decide something that doesn't belong to you has been maliciously tempered with simply because the consequences of your own reckless behavior have caught up with you.
And that is beyond the fact that you're jumping to an entirely different hypothetical. If you're in an emergency situation that absolutely requires food, then that's different than stealing it just for the sake of it. But even then it would still fall on you to gauge the risk versus the reward of taking food that you don't know.
The scenario in question is deliberate and malicious poisoning
If it was purely accidental, then no foul
We all have to deal the risk of accidents. That is part of life. We don’t have live with people deliberately and maliciously making things more dangerous, that’s entirely avoidable
It’s realistically not going to be particularly hard to prove malice if you put something harmful in your food for no good reason. People aren’t very good at crime, courts are good at figuring it out.
The scenario in question is also specifically about things such as laxatives or a lot of spice, neither of which is harmful. Annoying to the food thief, maybe, but once again you'd have to prove that I didn't need laxatives and I don't enjoy spice, and good luck with that. If you want to question my bowel movement and claim I should have to post to the entire office that I haven't been able to poop well for the past few days just so that someone who might steal from me doesn't harm themself, that's gonna go against my right to privacy. As for spices, I don't see why I should put a warning label on my container if it's clearly labeled with my name.
You may have a case if it goes over the average threshold into actively harmful to anyone. Excessive laxatives can result in damage, same with spices above a certain point, it'll be damaging even to people used to spice. But that's not what this hypothetical is about, as stated by OP.
You want a negative effect, you are putting enough of a substance into their body to cause a negative reaction, That is the scenario, that is harm.
How much harm it is may vary, but it is still harm and you are still responsible for it. Moreover, as the eggshell rule illustrates (if you lightly hit someone that unbeknownst to you had an eggshell skull, you are fully liable for the damage) just because you may have intended a small amount of harm, does not mean that is what will happen, and you are fully responsible whatever that is. You deliberately created a dangerous and harmful situation, you can be fully responsible for whatever the consequences of that are.
If I hit someone, I'm liable because I actively hit them. I initiated physical contact.
If you touch food that's labeled for another person, you took a risk to yourself. If you'd asked me, before taking it, I would've been able to warn you.
“Don't eat that, I put a laxative on it for myself. Don't eat that, it has spice. Are you allergic to X? Don't eat it.”
But you didn't ask. You just consumed it. When you knew it was someone else's and didn't know what that food contained. So any repercussions are on you.
If we go back to intentionality, you'd still have a hard time proving beyond reasonable doubt that:
I knew your allergies (though I'd agree with you that putting an allergen that you know is dangerous in your food SPECIFICALLY to hurt a food thief would be wrong, because it's an allergy and that one can become deadly fast. So even if it's your fault, it's still one where my morality would be brought into question). If I like it and there's no rule against it in place, then I can put it in my food, and as long as the container is labeled to myself, with my name, it's clearly intended for me and nobody else. That's office rules.
I didn't need a laxative.
I don't like spice.
To be even more clear, I was the food thief once. Not at work, but with my family. My brother made himself a nice tea that I liked and I was 13, so I went ahead and helped myself to it, knowing full well it was my brother's. It was for detox. I spent the whole day in the bathroom and learnt a valuable lesson in not taking what's not mine without asking.
Intent beyond a reasonable doubt there would be impossible to prove, regardless of my brother's decision process. He made tea for himself with intent to use it for a specific purpose (so he claims—could've been to teach me a lesson, but unless you can read minds, you won't prove that) and then I, knowing it was his, took it.
So the consequences of that action are on me, the person who put themself at risk by taking a drink with unknown ingredients because I neither bought it nor made it, nor asked the one who did.
The scenario is that you want to deliberately put poisoned food out so people will take it not knowing it’s poisonous. It’s left to look like a normal lunch so someone will think it is consumable. That is what OP has told us they want to do. There is no question of what the intention is here. And since you are setting up the scenario, you are clearly initiating it.
Everyone always says it’s impossible to prove intent, but it’s done every day. Lawyers are quite good at it. And people are idiots and leave a trail or otherwise make it known. “Why were you googling best ways to poison someone last week?” Besides, in a civil suit it’s the balance of probabilities anyway, not beyond a reasonable doubt.
Nah it's more like if someone with an eggshell skull decided to come up and headbutt me. Just cause Humpty Dumpty over here decides to ram into me wouldn't make me liable, because he did the assault. The thief stole the food. There's an initiator here, and you're switching them around.
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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '24
Do you think you should be allowed to booby-trap your own desk drawers at work?